“…that which we call a rose. By any other name would smell as sweet.” Wm. Shakespeare
As if the modern world wasn’t confusing enough, we’ve noticed that more and more companies are giving technical sounding names to their products, or at least to the model names. It wasn’t that long ago that products had names you could remember and there was only one item per name. For example, tissues came in one size inside a blue and white box, period. There were no subspecies such as quilted, padded, see-thru, extra-thick, mansize, pocketsize, designer box, colored box, oblong box, square box, round box, oval box…well you get the idea. Now before the tissue industry gets all over us we must say that we LOVE the idea of all those types of tissues, but we still prefer the old Sears method of differentiating products as “good, better, best.”
Recently we went shopping for a cd player. You know, an ancient device that plays obsolete plastic discs with music on them. For boomers who have really been under a rock, we’re not talking about records. We quickly found out that only two companies still make cd players. Each had a product simply called “CD Player,” but there were about 431 models of each and models had names like TX-11-4A-D, which is different from the TX-11-5A-D which is different from the TX-11-5A-F and so on. Pretty confusing.
So we dug a little deeper to see why all this complex code naming. Why not just call the thing the “LoungeMan” or the “LoungeMan Xtra” (for extra bass). Electronics companies are always leaving vowels out of names to make them seem more cool. Apparently all this coded naming confuses store sales clerks too, because when we asked why the TX-11-4A-D was $6.99 more than the TX-11-4A-C, all we got was a blank stare. It made us feel much better that even people under age 30 have trouble with all this too. We did eventually find out that the price difference was because the cheaper model had no on/off button since most younger buyers don’t need it.
After our experience at Blessed Buy we began to notice that products of all types, not just electronics, had some strange names. Out in the parking lot we saw an SUV named the Sequoia. The name fit the vehicle while parked, but we wondered how they would advertise a moving truck that is named after a tree. “It’s built big and it’s built tough, like a Sequoia!” Okay so far, but what about how it handles on the road? “It’s built big and it’s made to move and handle like a, um, er, uh…” So much for that ad campaign.
We applaud car manufacturers for staying with names we can remember, even if some are meaningless and have nothing to do with transportation. The Camry, for example, is an English version of the Japanese word for “crown” which, to the best of our knowledge is not something you can drive around in. The rival Honda Accord was so named because the company wanted a car that would reflect “harmony and accord” between vehicle and driver (yawn). That’s all fine, but we still prefer names that gave a real image to a car, names based on verbs like Charger or Challenger, or names of fast, powerful animals like Mustang, Barracuda and Jaguar.
So we bought our cd player, model TX-11-5A-D, with an on/off button that’s been off most of the past week because they forgot to pack the user manual. That’s no problem in this day and age right? You can just go online, key in the model and download a user manual, right? No. You also have to know what version of the user manual to order, which is determined by the manufacture date that’s printed on the…you guessed it…user manual that comes in the box.
One final note about all this naming, especially for electronics. Every store these days advertises they have the lowest prices and can beat or match anyone else’s pricing. Well, it’s true. However, there is no way you can find the same identical model at another store because the manufacturers only sell one specific model to one specific store chain. So while the TX-11-5A-B at Blessed Buy may be identical to the TX-11-5A-W at Wallsmart, that last identifying letter lets them each say, “nope, that’s not the same one we have on sale here!” Also, since they have hyphens, the model numbers create havoc when trying to search for reviews online.
We’re impressed with the computerized efficiency of the new names, but we miss our old GE color TV from the 60’s. It was called a “GE color TV.”
Note: Our usually efficient research helpers were not able to come up with any kind of industry standard naming conventions for home electronic products, though it was obvious that many of the schemes used are heavily influenced by engineers and IT folks trying to keep things straight in a database somewhere. We did find several descriptions of how to interpret television models however. For example, in the name KDL-32V5000, Sony uses the first three letters to designate it’s an lcd screen, followed by two numbers for screen size, then one letter for series and up to four numbers for variants within the series. It seems to work great for computers if not for humans.
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